The exceptional moment has come to be recognised as a central theme of modern literature. The concept of ‘instant’ (Augenblick) has proven useful in this regard. In order to explore it – as has become more and more clear – various works of classical and romantic modernity can be considered, so that beyond intellectualhistorical or monographic insights, an understanding of its structure can be achieved. A promising start can be made with a comparative analysis of representative instants, which helps provide an initial clarification of the semantic and symbolic complexity of this concept, for here the underlying problem of this theme, that is the intellectual reference of the emphasis peculiar to the exceptional temporal modality, will appear in all its clarity. Stated baldly in a formula: the instant with a claim to eternity must be distinguished from the instant as a moment without duration. The instant with a claim to eternity finds its paradigm in Goethe's negative Faustian sentence on the instant that should linger. Positively, one could reckon spiritual epiphanies to this category, as well. The Pentecost in Hölderlin's hymn ‘Patmos’ (1801), and the emphatic concept of a ‘now’ as developed by Heidegger in his reading of Hölderlin, can serve as examples here.

However, it is already clear that the status of such an instant, referring to an eternal time or a transcendentally invested point in time, is not actually the ‘instant’ that so characterises modern literature, and primarily classical modernism, and which is here considered. None the less, it can serve an important comparative function, for it allows us to investigate the extent to which the alternative conception, the instant as moment without duration, that is, the ‘suddenness’ of classical modernism, truly escapes metaphysical reference. For the particular sense of such a structure of ‘suddenness’ as we find in texts of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Robert Musil, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin and not least the French surrealists consists precisely in the paired aspects of an emphasis and an unclear justification for that emphasis.